The Looming Tower

I've plodded through a bunch of books about the War on Terror, by academics
and by journalists. This is by far the best. Lawrence Wright is a staff
writer for The New Yorker, which is saying a lot, and he won the
Pulitzer Prize for this study of the personalities and the feuds that led
up to 9/11. Buy it. Read it. Here are some of my notes from my own first
read of a book that I will certainly read again:

E. B. White, writing in The New Yorker at the dawn of the atomic
age in 1948, noted that for the first time in its history, the city
had become vulnerable: "A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of
geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the
bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers.... In the
mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York
must hold a steady, irresistible charm." (p.14)

Anti-semitism in Egypt: "in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio,
coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected
the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became
a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The
rise of the Islamic movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but
they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier." (pp.38-39)

Al-Qaeda recruits got $1,000 a month ($1,500 for married men), a round-trip
ticket home each year, a month's vacation, a health-care plan, and a
buy-out option: if you wanted to leave, you got $2,400 and no hard
feelings. "From the beginning, al-Qaeda presented itself as an attractive
employment opportunity for men whose education and careers had been
curtailed by jihad." (p.142)

Bin Laden's goal from the beginning was to "drag the United States
into a war with Islam--'a large-scale front which it cannot control'."
(p.172, quoting al-Hammadi, "The Inside Story of al-Qa'ida.")

In 1992, Abu Hajer al-Iraqi (Mamdouh Salim) formalized the jihad with
two fatwas, one authorizing an attack on American troops passing through
Somalia, the other approving the murder of innocents in the pursuit of
the first. Al-Qaeda was no longer an army of mujahideen defending Muslim
lands, as in Afghanistan and Chechnya. "The Soviet Union was dead and
communism no longer menaced the margins of the Islamic world. America was
the only power capable of blocking the restoration of the ancient Islamic
caliphate, and it would have to be confronted and defeated." (p.175)

After the fact, bin Laden spoke of the World Trade Center as "those
awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity"
(p.176, quoting OBL on al-Jazeera, Oct 2001. Note that, to him, liberty
and human rights aren't concepts to be admired.)

Omar Abdul Rahman ("the blind sheikh") came to American and issued a
fatwa that allowed his followers to rob banks and kill Jews. "He traveled
widely in the United States and Canada, arousing thousands of young
immigrant Muslims ... against Americans, who he said are 'descendants of
apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists,
Communists, and colonialists'." And the West
generallly: "cut the
transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy,
burn their comanies, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill
them on the sea, air, or land." (pp.176-77, quoting Kohlmann,
Al-Qaida's
Jihad in Europe.)

The actual bomber (1993) was Ramzi Yousef. "It is unclear if bin Laden
sent him, but he was a product of an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where
he had learned his bomb-craft." (p.177)

There were 33 American cities that opened branches of bin Laden's
and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam's organization, the Services Bureau, to
support jihad. (p.179)

One of the al-Qaeda instructors was Ali Mohammed, who had enlisted
in the U.S. Army Special Forces with such good effect that he'd taught
a course on Middle East politics and culture at Fort Bragg, meanwhile
copying the army training manuals at Kinko's. In the Sudan, bin
Laden took his first course on surveillance. (p.189)

"This battle is not between al-Qaeda and
the U.S. This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders."
(p.209, quoting bin Laden on al-Jazeera, Oct 2001)

Bin Laden: "America is a great power possessed of tremendous military
might and a wide-ranging economy, but all this is based on an unstable
foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its weak
spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it
will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership."
(p.308, quoting Bin Laden's Sermon for the Feast of the Sacrifice, Feb 2003)
Thus the White House, Capitol, and Pentagon were targeted. Kaled Sheikh
Mohammed proposed the World Trade Center, which his nephew Ramzi Yousef
had tried to bring down. Buildings in Chicago and Los Angeles were also
discussed, but bin Laden postponed them.

The management philosophy: "centralization of decision and
decentralization of execution" (p.318)

While bin Laden was essentially broke after he was driven out of
Sudan, after the USS Cole bombing, "suitcases filled with
petrodollars" arrived in Afghanistan "from the Gulf states". (p.331)

No response for the Cole. "Bin Laden was angry and disappointed.
He had hoped to lure America into the same trap
the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually
attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm
upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its
wounds.... The declaration of war, the strike on the American embassies,
and now the bombing of the Cole had been inadequate, however, to
provoke a massive retaliation. He would have to create an irresistable
outrage." (p.331)

"Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower" (p.350, passage
from the Quran quoted three times by bin Laden in a videotaped speech
recovered in Hamburg, seen as directed to the 9/11 hijackers)